From the first shocking scenes of the bloodied survivors emerging out of
the ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the iconic image of
fireman Chris Fields holding the broken body of one-year-old Baylee Almon in
his arms, media coverage has struggled to locate the Oklahoma City bombing
in an appropriate story line.

For the first 48 hours, when it was widely reported that foreign
terrorists (probably "Islamic militants") were responsible, the
bombing was understood as yet another example of America being victimized by
aliens—an innocent nation in a wicked world—and enthusiastic calls for
righteous vengeance littered opinion pieces and letters to the editors in
newspapers across the land. If Oklahoma City was like Beirut, it was because
foreign terrorists had defiled America’s "heartland" with alien
forms of terror, shattering a widespread sense of American
"innocence," as if the nation fell into the harsh and often
murderous realities of history for the first time with the body count in
Oklahoma City.

With the arrest of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols several days after
the bombing, however, explanatory narratives became more complicated. The
uncomfortable realization that this horror had been carried out by white
male Gulf War veterans—one of them a decorated veteran at that—sparked
the excavation of a completely different story of American identity. It was
a story of a nation tormented by enduring legacies of racism, xenophobia,
and violent populism, of virulent cancers emerging from the national body,
with the Oklahoma City bombing seen as a tumor, an indicator of more
profound internal disease.

Enduring convictions of innocence could only be maintained by distancing
McVeigh and Nichols from "real" America and "real"
Americans. Harper’s publisher John MacArthur said of his media
colleagues, "They are going to turn them into oddball crazies,
caricaturing McVeigh as a trailer park terrorist, which is no better than
the caricature of the Arabs." Indeed, McVeigh and Nicols were called
"monsters," "drifters," "loners," and
"reptilian-like murderers." Time’s Lance Morrow portrayed
the perpetrators as violent resident aliens existing at the nation’s
"delusional margins." The editors of U.S. News and World Report
assured the public that the lesson to take from Oklahoma was not that the
American character was flawed but that it was "still
incandescent."

To be sure, some outside the American media mainstreamsaw the
perpetrators as representing an authentic if virulent strain of national
identity. Jonathan Friedland, the Washington correspondent for the London
Guardian, told a National Public Radio audience that McVeigh struck him
as "wholly American, from his belief in government conspiracy, to his
infatuation with guns, even to his ‘loner’ persona." In an angry
column in the Nation, Katha Pollitt declared, "If we’re
seriously interested in understanding how a young man could blow up a
building full of hundreds of people, why not start by acknowledging that the
state he now claims to oppose gave him his first lesson in killing?"

McVeigh and Nichols were contaminants of the body politic precisely
because they could finally not be dismissed as alien beings. They had
undergone the traditional rite of passage for American males, service in the
Armed Forces, and emerged not as able citizens but as mass murderers,
imagining themselves warriors in a holy crusade against the federal
government in which body counts of civilians were a necessary part of the
struggle.

This sense of contamination is evident in the hundreds of letters from
schoolchildren in Michigan, where the perpetrators spent time at James
Nichols’ farm and reportedly attended meetings of the Michigan Militia.
The letters plead for Oklahoma City schoolchildren not to hate them for
being from Michigan. The sense of shame was so great that several early
unsolicited memorial ideas came from Michigan residents who thought memorial
suggestion would be a way of "doing penance" for living in a state
widely viewed after the bombing as a bastion for the extreme and often
violent world view of the militias—a state sometimes called "Militiagan."

Beyond Michigan, the sense of contamination spread to the small towns in
New York state where McVeigh lived and went to school. Students soon learned
that they were labeled as being "from McVeigh-land," and called
"The Bombers." A sense of contamination by association was also
felt by residents of Kingman, Arizona, the home of accomplice Michael
Fortier and a place where McVeigh lived for a brief time; of Junction City,
Kansas, where McVeigh rented the Ryder truck that carried the bomb; of
Herington, Kansas, where Terry Nichols lived. McVeigh’s motel room in
Junction City was remodeled, and residents of Herington took great pains to
let representatives of the national media know that since Nichols had only
lived there for a few weeks he was not one of them.

The threat of the toxic presence of the perpetrators was in evidence as
well during the planning of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation’s
Memorial Center, as the desire for a museum exhibition to tell the story of
April 19th and its aftermath clashed with an equally strong
desire to prevent pollution of the memorial center by inclusion of the faces
or stories of the perpetrators. Planners struggled with an exhibition script
that included "the dark side." Eventually they settled on small
side rooms that told the story of the arrest and trial of McVeigh and
Nichols with little visual representation.

The bombing not only sparked explorations of American innocence,
violence, and the threat of contamination from perpetrators. It quickly
became cultural capital to be used in ongoing battles in the culture wars.
Oklahoma City figured prominently in often angry discussions about the
complicity—if any—of hate radio; in the suddenly perceived threat from
militia culture; in debates over habeas corpus reform; in a renewed call for
limits to free speech; and, of course, in debates over the death penalty.

Both civic and religious arguments over the death penalty—its morality
or immorality, fairness or unfairness, the traumatic impact or therapeutic
value of restricted or general public viewing of the execution—were
predictable, enduring arguments set in a new context. But the horror of the
event, the complete lack of even the most minute sign of remorse from
McVeigh in word or gesture, and (shortly before his execution) his cold,
calculating characterization of the 19 children murdered as "collateral
damage," made the case against this particular death sentence less
persuasive for many.

An overwhelming majority of Americans quite simply believed that Timothy
McVeigh deserved to die for his horrendous crime. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup
poll in early May 2001 showed that while 59 percent of Americans
"generally support the death penalty and believe McVeigh should receive
it," 22 percent "generally opposed the death penalty, but support
executing McVeigh." Only 16 percent "generally oppose capital
punishment even in McVeigh’s case."

Sentiment for the death penalty was strong in Oklahoma City and the wider
culture from the time of McVeigh’s arrest. Darcy O’Brien, a Tulsa
writer, observed that "this is, after all, the Bible Belt, where ideas
of the noble savage or the perfectibility of humankind have never cut much
ice. People here may pray to Jesus, but they believe in the God of
wrath." This wrath was expressed in early suggestions that the Oklahoma
City memorial be a place for the torture of the perpetrators, a place where
their heads would hang on a pole, a place where they would be executed.

Yet, as they mobilized their resources to help people struggle with the
meaning of the bombing, religious leaders struggled with the imperative of
forgiveness. Rev. Gene Garrison, pastor of First Baptist Church in Oklahoma
City said, "I know I’m supposed to pray for the people who did this,
but I’m finding that very hard to do when I look at these little
babies." Shortly after the bombing, Rev. Nick Harris of the First
Methodist Church—so badly damaged in the bombing that the congregation was
forced elsewhere for services—declared, "If we are going to be a
church and not a social club…we must pray for those who did this."

Catholics took a strong stand against McVeigh’s execution. Pope John
Paul II asked President Bush to spare his life, and a number of American
cardinals spoke out against it. Our Sunday Visitor argued that
execution closed off any chance for McVeigh’s eventual repentance, and Commonweal
declared that the "consequence of a murder and of a legal execution is
the same: A human life is ended by an act of human will. Taking life to show
life should not be taken doesn’t parse."

A broad coalition of religious leaders urged President Bush to enact a
moratorium on all federal executions and grant clemency to McVeigh, among
them the National Council of Churches, the Episcopal Church, the
Presbyterian Church, USA, the American Baptist Church, USA, the
Autocephalous Holy Eastern Orthodox Church, the Archdiocese of the Americas,
the United Church of Christ, the Reformed Church in America, the Christian
Church (Disciples of Christ) the Church of the Brethren, and leaders of
Reformed Judaism.

In 1998, a year after McVeigh was sentenced to die, some evangelicals
expressed doubts about the death penalty because of then Texas Governor
George W. Bush’s refusal to grant clemency to convicted murderer Karla
Faye Tucker, who had declared that she had been born again in prison. The
influential evangelical magazine Christianity Today called the death
penalty "unfair and discriminatory."

One of the most articulate death-penalty opponents was Bud Welch, whose
daughter Julie, a translator in the Social Security office, was murdered in
the bombing. Welch, who owns a Texaco service station in Oklahoma City, has
conveyed to many audiences his journey from rage at the perpetrators to
recalling his daughter’s opposition to the death penalty, and his eventual
conviction that he wished to honor her memory through his work against it.
Rooting his conviction in the Roman Catholic tradition, Welch believes that
McVeigh’s execution will continue a cycle of violence and redeem no one
from their grief. How, he asks, "can we live in the Gospel’s message
to love our neighbor if we deliberately kill him? Would Jesus pull the
switch or inject the needle?"

In September 1998, Welch traveled to Buffalo, New York, to meet with Bill
McVeigh, Timothy’s father and his sister Jennifer. They spent two hours
together, and when he left, he hugged them both. He told the Protestant
magazine Guideposts, "I’d gone to church all my life and had
never felt as close to God as I did at that moment."

Death penalty opponents carried out public vigils praying for McVeigh,
churches rang bells at the time of the execution, and Scripture was put to
use to make the case against state-sponsored killing. Writing in the New
York Review of Books, Garry Wills observed that "Bible-quoting
fundamentalists" ignore the "one place in the Gospels where Jesus
deals with capital punishment" (John 8:3-11), and then observes that
while George Bush claimed Jesus was his favorite philosopher, "he did
not hesitate to endorse the execution of 152 human beings in Texas,"
where numerous public defenders were "sanctioned by the Texas bar for
legal misbehavior or incompetence." Mr. Bush, Wills remarked,
"clearly needs some deeper consultation with the philosopher of his
choice."

Opponents also argued that there were other ways to remove the
contamination of a mass murderer from the body politic through a sentence of
life without parole. By so doing, they argued, McVeigh would not be given
the chance to choose a martyr’s death. "[E]xecuted now, he goes to
his death young, vibrant, defiant—heroic to the twisted and angry,"
Paul Finkelman, a law professor at the University of Tulsa, told USA
Today. "Left in his cell, he ages. The ‘where are they now’
pictures will show McVeigh wrinkled, raving and angry, frustrated to be
alive."

Supporters of the death penalty also made use of Scripture: Mormons cited
passages from the Hebrew Bible (Num. 35:16) and the Book of Mormon,
"Woe unto the murderer who deliberately killeth, for he shall
die." (2 Nep. 9:35). Evangelical theologian Carl Henry cited Genesis
9:6 ("whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s
blood be shed"), and Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship
Ministries declared, "[N]owhere does Jesus set aside the requirements
of civil law."

Conservative evangelicals (including the Southern Baptist Convention, the
largest Protestant denomination in the country), Orthodox Jews, and Muslims
supported capital punishment in some cases, and they were joined in this
particular instance by many members of religious communities formally
opposed to the death penalty. Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, a Roman
Catholic, was not persuaded by Roman Catholic opposition. "Anyone who
would do something this horrific, anyone who murders 168 of our neighbors
and smash into oblivion the lives of 19 children deserves the death penalty.
I mean, that’s real simple."

Many family members of those murdered and survivors understood that the
execution and their right to view it on closed-circuit television in
Oklahoma City might be traumatic, might not assuage their grief, but would
finally remove the contaminating presence of Timothy McVeigh from the body
politic and their lives. Family members observed that even behind bars,
McVeigh was present in interviews and in letters he wrote that were made
public, and that his death would at least silence his voice forever.

And where many opponents of the death penalty hoped that clemency might
enable McVeigh to repent and restore his connection to the body politic,
many supporters of the death penalty perceived his very body to be toxic.
Just as there were those who opposed bringing the bodies of the Jonestown
dead into Delaware after their mass suicide in 1978, so there was opposition
to burying McVeigh’s body in American soil. Already deprived of the right
of military burial by legislation passed in 1997, McVeigh’s mortal remains
were cremated and the ashes scattered at an undisclosed location. Even this
was too good for the editors of National Review, who declared that he
should be dragged "through the desert behind horses until the bastard
disappears."

The horror unleashed on April 19, 1995 remains unfinished business.
It endures in the active grief of the family members, survivors, and
rescuers who engaged the event through memorial-building. It endures in the
media’s infatuation with the language of pop psychology, as terms like
"closure" and "healing process" often replaced the
traditional religious language through which people had engaged loss for
centuries.

It endures as well in the increasingly intense religious debate over the
death penalty on the meaning of justice, vengeance, forgiveness,
reconciliation, repentance, redemption, and the sacredness of life. And it
endures in an equally intense cultural experience of the symbolic power of
Timothy McVeigh and his threat to the purity of the body politic through his
deeds, his continued life, and even the presence of his body in the soil of
the nation.

As much as it is the final step of a legal process, the death penalty is
a civil religious ritual of exclusion and purification, enacted on the alien
bodies of domestic perpetrators. How this ritual relates to the more
recognizably religious debate is not entirely clear. What is clear is
that the execution of Timothy McVeigh will end neither the intensifying
debate nor the lasting appeal of the ritual.